Friday, March 02, 2007

NCAA Tournament Challenge: Sign Up!

Last year, the 10,000-plus "Daily Quickie Readers" group of ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge was the single-largest NCAA Tournament bracket office pool in the country. Rallying that many people was the column's greatest moment. I don't expect 10,000 entries this year, but it would be cool to get as many of the old gang back together for this year's edition. Use this link to sign up, and spread the word: The epic "Daily Quickie Readers" group is back.(BTW: You get up to 5 entries, so there's no excuse not to Join in!)

This year I'm going to do something very stupid with my bracket like I do every year...my favorites being taking Syracuse out in the 1st round the year they won it all and, of course, picking Kansas to win it all last year.

The only year I've won a pool was UCLA's 1995 victory. I won over like 500 people. It's was exactly like this one, meaning if you get all 4, or even 3 final-4 teams, you pretty much are guarenteed a top 10 finish and in the money.

The next couple of years...not so much. ie: South Carolina in the final 4 one year and elite 8 the next...nothing like losing as a #2 and #3 seed back to back years!

That never works. We used to rope all the secretaries in for $5. Usually by midway of day 1, one was hopelessly in last place. Then by the elite 8 they were all eliminated, but not so badly as to keep them not wanting to play in subsequent years. The winner was always somebody who knew *something*.

Yeah...you definitely have to know something. If not, they will either 1.) write it out with no upsets or 2.) have a teams like duke, north carolina, ucla, and dayton in the final 4 just b/c they are the only teams they know.*

I think it is alright to discuss the brackets here because most of us will be participating in the group. In fantasy sports most us play but we are not competeting against each other so who cares if an injury kills your fantasy chances.

it's not the same.....the brackets are identifiable (i don't know your fantasy roster). plus EVERYONE'S got a bracket, and even if you don't, there's a "right answer" to the bracket. with fantasy, there's no right answer unless you've got the league leader at every position. Here, it's clear what's right and wrong. The bracket is inherent to enjoying the tournament, in that the tourney actually follows brackets. You can enjoy baseball/football without having a fantasy team, because it's secondary.

I had Kansas winnign the title the year they lost to Bucknell in round 1.

Most years I do very well, but I'm normally the victim of being in a way too smart league.

1. Last year if you only got 2 of the Final Four teams correct you were fucked. Almost everyone in the pool had LSU and UCLA. The top %25 of the pool were the ones smart enough to get Florida out of that bracket.

2. The year UConn won it (2004) you needed to get the entire Final Four correct to have any type of shot. 50 out of 125 people nailed the entire Final Four that year (the bais is that we were all GT students).

In my office pool, I always submit two brackets--one with actual picks, and one where I simply pick every last game to go on-seed. This is otherwise known as "the selection committee's bracket." It's worth the five bucks just to see how it does. Amazingly, it's always almost pretty close to exactly in the middle of the pack.

Last year, we had only one guy picking the Gators to win it all, and not even that was enough for first place (the rest of his bracket was filled with all kinds of unlikely randomness).

I wrote a Windows program to run an office pool at my company a few years back before all the Internet free ones. Because it was so easy to enter a bracket and scoring 1 entry or 1000 was the same work (it even built an email list to send partial results), it was fun to try out how different pools would have done.

It turns out, picking all favorites and better seeds would have finished you right near the top but out of the money. Some years like last, the people who nailed some of the big upsets are the ones who won. Typically you need to pick mainly favorites and a few choice upsets. If you nail your upsets, then you have a real good chance to win.

Going with all favorites will always do well but almost never win in a big pool. Picking a large number of upsets is typically a terrible strategy.

I did pretty bad in the basketball pool last year but was right near the top in the bowl game pool on ESPN since I picked all Big East teams and they were 5-0.

The year Syracuse won it I foolishly picked them to lose in the sweet 16 despite being a huge fan. You always need to have one pool with your heart. Then you can always have a second entry trying to use logic.

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DanShanoff.com is a sports-blog spin-off of my long-time ESPN.com column, "The Daily Quickie." Anchored by an early-morning post of must-know topics, the blog is updated frequently throughout the day with new posts and user comments.